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9/11Tree Of Souls The Mythology Of Judaism Schwartz, Howard 2004
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- Publication date
- 2004
- Topics
- Jewish Legends, Jewish Mythology
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- journals_contributions; journals
- Language
- English
- Item Size
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Title: Tree of souls : the mythology of Judaism
Author: Schwartz, Howard,
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Dewey Call Number := 296.1 SCH
ISBN: 9780195086799
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Publication Information: Oxford ; New York :
Oxford University Press, 2004.
Publisher: Oxford University Press,
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Format: Regular print
Physical Description: lxxxvi, 618 p. : ill. ; 26 cm.
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General Note: Retellings of nearly 700 Jewish myths.
Subject Term: Jewish legends. Jewish mythology.
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Added Author: Loebel-Fried, Caren.
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====================
🌍 Table of Contents ◄☀
Preface
Introduction
►01🔯 Book One Myths of God.
►02🔯 Book Two Myths of Creation.
►03🔯 Book Three Myths of Heaven.
►04🔯 Book Four Myths of Hell.
►05🔯 Book Five Myths of the Holy Word.
►06🔯 Book Six Myths of the Holy Time.
►07🔯 Book Seven Myths of the Holy People.
►08🔯 Book Eight Myths of the Holy Land.
►09🔯 Book Nine Myths of Exile.
►10🔯 Book Ten Myths of the Messiah.
============================================
☀►Summary ◄☀
Only one of the world's mythologies has remained essentially unrecognized--the mythology of Judaism.
As Howard Schwartz reveals in Tree of Souls, the first anthology of Jewish mythology in English, this mythical tradition is as rich and as fascinating as any in the world.
Drawing from the Bible, the Pseudepigrapha, the Talmud and Midrash, the kabbalistic literature, medieval folklore, Hasidic texts, and oral lore collected in the modern era, Schwartz has gathered together nearly 700 of the key Jewish myths.
The myths themselves are marvelous. We read of Adam'sdiamond and the Land of Eretz (where it is always dark), the fall of Lucifer and the quarrel of the sun and the moon, the Treasury of Souls and the Divine Chariot.
We discover new tales about the great figures of the Hebrew Bible, from Adam to Moses; stories about God's Bride, the Shekhinah, and theevil temptress, Lilith; plus many tales about angels and demons, spirits and vampires, giant beasts and the Golem.
Equally important, Schwartz provides a wealth of additional information.
For each myth, he includes extensive commentary,
revealing the source of the myth and explaining how it relates to other Jewish myths as well as to world literature
(for instance, comparing Eve's release of evil into the world with Pandora's).
For ease of use, Schwartz divides the volume into ten books:
Myths of God, Myths of Creation, Myths of Heaven, Myths of Hell, Myths of the Holy Word, Myths of the HolyTime, Myths of the Holy People, Myths of the Holy Land, Myths of Exile, and Myths of the Messiah. Schwartz,
a renowned collector and teller of traditional Jewish tales, now illuminates the previously unexplored territory of Jewish mythology.
This pioneering anthology is essential for anyone interested in the Hebrew Bible, Jewish faith and culture, and world mythology.
♠ Author Notes ♠
Howard Schwartz is Professor of English at the University of Missouri-St. Louis.
He is the editor of Elijah's Violin and Other Jewish Fairy Tales, Miriam's Tambourine: Jewish Folktales from Around the World, Lilith's Cave:
Jewish Tales of the Supernatural, and Gabriel's Palace: Jewish MysticalTales. Caren Loebel-Fried is an award-winning illustrator and author of many works on mythology.
Her Hawaiian Legends of the Guardian Spirits received the 2003 Ka Palapala Po`okela Award for Excellence in Illustration.
♠ Syndetics ICE Summary ♠
The first anthology of Jewish mythology in English, Tree of Souls reveals a mythical tradition as rich and as fascinating as any in the world.
Drawing from the Bible, the Pseudepigrapha, the Talmud and Midrash, the kabbalistic literature, medieval folklore, Hasidic texts, and oral lore collected in the modern era, Schwartz has gathered together nearly 700 of the key Jewish myths. The myths themselves are marvelous.
We read of Adams diamond and the Land of Eretz (where it is always dark), the fall of Lucifer and the quarrel of the sun and the moon, the Treasury of Souls and the Divine Chariot.
We discover new tales about the great figures of the Hebrew Bible, from Adam to Moses; stories about God's Bride, the Shekhinah, and the evil temptress, Lilith; plus many tales about angels and demons, spirits and vampires, giant beasts and the Golem.
Equally important, Schwartz provides a wealth of additional information.
For each myth, he includes extensive commentary, revealing the source of the myth and explaining how it relates to other Jewish myths as well as to world literature (for instance, comparing Eves release of evil into the world with Pandoras).
For ease of use, Schwartz divides the volume into ten books, Myths of God, Myths of Creation, Myths of Heaven, Myths of Hell, Myths of the Holy Word, Myths of the Holy Time, Myths of the Holy People, Myths of the Holy Land, Myths of Exile, and Myths of the Messiah.
(Ingram 2014-05-06)
============================================
☀► Booklist Review ◄☀
Schwartz notes in his impressive introduction that some may be surprised at the idea of a Jewish mythology since Judaism is a monotheistic religion, meaning there can be no interaction among multiple gods, one of the hallmarks of mythology.
Yet the Bible, Schwartz notes, is written so compactly that there is plenty of room for interpretation, and out of interpretation, mythology flowers.
Drawing from the Bible, from the Talmud and Midrash, and from kabbalistic literature and medieval folklore, Schwartz explicates nearly 700 Jewish myths organized around broad themes such as myths of creation, heaven, and the Messiah.
Some are familiar, such as the stories about Adam's first wife, Lilith, but most are not well known, although they are linked directly to biblical stories.
For instance, one section begins with the Genesis story of Cain and Abel and then follows with myths about various aspects of the brothers' lives.
Going beyond the mythologies, Schwartz provides a wealth of supplementary information including sources and other world myths.
This remarkable work will be of interest to both the scholar and the browser. --
Ilene Cooper Copyright 2004 Booklist
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♠ Library Journal Review ♠
Schwartz (English, Univ. of Missouri, St. Louis) gathers nearly 700 Jewish myths, organized into ten sections, with additional commentary for each selection revealing the source and explaining how it relates to other myths as well as to world literature.
This is not exactly new; works by Hayim Bialik and Yehoshua Ravinitzky, Rabbi Yakov ibn Chabib, and Louis Ginzberg also gather Aggadic stories.
Schwartz, however, has widened his category of inclusion, drawing not only from Talmudim and midrashim but also from
"outside texts" (sefer hitzonim) of the Apocrypha and pseudepigrapha; Gnostic, Samaritan, and Karaite texts; and more mainstream rabbinical works, such as excerpts from the Dead Sea Scrolls, Hekhalot texts and Kabalistic literature, medieval folklore, and Hasidic texts.
Refreshingly, Schwartz also rightly includes Kafka's Vor dem Gesetz ("Before the Law").
Note that some Orthodox Jews may object to the use of the term myths, as Judaism is conceived as a religion of revealed law viewed as truth.
Outstanding bibliographies and an "Israel Folktale Archives List" complete this excellent book of wondrous stories.
Highly recommended. David B. Levy, Charles E. Smith Jewish Day Sch., Rockville,
MD (c) Copyright 2010. Library Journals LLC, a wholly owned subsidiary of Media Source, Inc. No redistribution permitted.
========================================
♠ Choice Review ♠
Schwartz (English, Univ. of Missouri) offers a charming, illuminating book that will appeal to a wide range of readers.
For a long time, scholars argued that Judaism lacked mythology; indeed they claimed that Judaism represented a dramatic break with earlier, more myth-based religions.
Underlying this view was a negative evaluation of myths as both primitive and fundamentally untrue.
In recent years, however, scholars have sought to overturn this position by revealing the rich mythological tradition within Judaism and by redefining the category of myth itself in more sophisticated and positive terms.
Building on this scholarship, Schwartz has produced a book that is both accessible and engaging.
It is also thorough. Though no single volume could ever reproduce all the myths in Judaism, Tree of Souls contains a remarkably rich collection of traditions, helpfully organized according to a number of overarching themes, including myths of God, creation, heaven, hell, and so on.
These sections are further subdivided into even more specific categories such as the Garden of Eden, the Messiah, the Sabbath, the Torah, and many more. In short, there is something for everyone here.
^BSumming Up:
Recommended. All levels. N. R. Deutsch Swarthmore College
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Reviews
(2)
Reviewer:
ApolloXVII
-
favoritefavoritefavoritefavoritefavorite -
July 18, 2024
Subject: Tree of Souls & My Response To The 2021 Review
Subject: Tree of Souls & My Response To The 2021 Review
==Useful stuff about Tree of Souls==
Tree of Souls, by an eminent collector of Jewish folklore, is amazing. Most other collections of Jewish folklore are ... just that - folklore, with a bit of mythology mixed in. This is focused on Jewish mythology, and it's amazing not to need to sift through looking for the rare page on Jewish mythology, as opposed to the dozens of pages on, say, Hershel of Ostropolier.
==Me Waxing Philosophical==
Hi, junkiehulett! Normally, I'm all for people sharing opinions on a work, but do you realize that almost every phrase of your review is false, antisemitic, or both? Congrats, by the way.
In all seriousness, you appear to be doing the following things:
a) Conflating the actions of Israel with the actions of all Jews. That's like conflating the actions of, say, the DRC, or the slave-owning "Christians", with all of Christianity. Yes, Israel has done some bad things. But first of all, there is a substantial Israeli Jewish dissenting movement, and second of all, and more importantly, a government != the people, and actions of a government != the people of the ethnicity the country is primarily composed of. (That != means "is not equal to").
b) Double standards. No reviews on books of Korean myths? What about North Korea? China? What of the Uyghurs? German myths? What of Hitler? Russian? What about Ukraine? And so on. Israel has done many bad things and this does not exonerate it but it's ridiculous to pretend that you're not holding it to a double standard here.
c) THE HOLOCAUST WAS NOT FAKE.
End of discussion.
It is the *best-documented* genocide. We have testimony *of the people who did it*, who never argued its existence. We have testimony of everything, and it aligns perfectly. Further, the few minor errors (soap, anyone?) have been both identified and corrected in scholarly literature, and were at most minor quibbles. They in no way negated the mainstream figures: six million dead Jews, a few million others, depending on how you define "genocide" vs "political persecution" vs whatever (my line: if it was for something you couldn't change. Jehovah's Witnesses could convert, political opponents could stop speaking out, soldiers could not enlist; Jews, gays, Romani, disabled people, etc could not change that status under Nazi rule, but that's just my line). What you're doing is like in that joke about a museum guard who says a dino skeleton is, say, sixty-eight million years old, and thirty, since sixty-eight million is how old they said it was when he started working. Yes, we may have over/under counted by a few hundred deaths, but it doesn't matter; it's still six million, because otherwise we need to commit to the dinosaur being sixty-eight million and thirty years old.
Further, even if you accept that Jews could somehow have forged *the camps themselves*, the question still stands of where the Jews went. As I'm typing this, the world's Jewish population is still smaller than it was in *1939*, a terrifying statistic. Where did all those Jews go?
And if you say those were forged somehow - why in the world would my family, three seperate times - one after Kristallnacht, one after the invasion of Poland, one after Moldova - flee? The first two were factory owners. One, a former factory owner, became a truck driver in America. Why would he have, if not for a threat? Why would Moldovans uproot and move to Azerbaijan, Germans and Poles to Israel--or, at the time, Mandatory Palestine--and so on, if not for a threat?
Also, here's one more thing: This is a waste of your life. There's so much cool stuff out there. Bajillions (very scientific term here) of bacteria. New discoveries. New things. We're alive at a time when more knowledge has been produced than ever in the history of humanity. And there's so much we don't know, like how lightning, ice skating, static charge, sand flow, and so much else. We don't know and we're trying to figure it out and we're doing good at it and you could have done so much else with the time you poured into conspiracy theories. You could have learned some statistics to memorize, or even just to look up occasionally.
Because - for all that you are an examplar of the worst traits of humanity - humanity is *really cool*. We cooperate in ways unthinkable for chimps, and we're *mostly peaceful.* We learn new things, and we laugh and play and wonder and cry and love and live our lives on an infinitesimal speck in a solar system distinguished only by its lack of a second sun (most systems are binaries, with another star) in a typical galaxy, and we've never ventured far beyond it, and we are by all measures unimportant and infinitesimal and getting excited over stupid little things. We're cosmic babies. We think landing on the moon is a big deal, and it's really close to us even at the scale of the solar system!
But.
But, we still have done *so much.* We figured out the age of the Earth, and the universe. We've peered into the inside of the earth, no small feat, and discovered so much about atoms and quarks. We figured out what killed the dinosaurs, and we detected exoplanets. We proved Fermat's Last Theorem and cloned sheep, we discovered genes and began manipulating them, and we *ERADICATED A DISEASE*, smallpox (get your shots).
And all of that just in the twentieth century!
And here you go, denying facts, wasting your life consuming conspiracy theories.
Maybe the aliens have reached us, and they're here happily conversing with the cats. Cats don't do conspiracy theories. They're speciesist, sure, but conspiracy theorists? No.
Tree of Souls, by an eminent collector of Jewish folklore, is amazing. Most other collections of Jewish folklore are ... just that - folklore, with a bit of mythology mixed in. This is focused on Jewish mythology, and it's amazing not to need to sift through looking for the rare page on Jewish mythology, as opposed to the dozens of pages on, say, Hershel of Ostropolier.
==Me Waxing Philosophical==
Hi, junkiehulett! Normally, I'm all for people sharing opinions on a work, but do you realize that almost every phrase of your review is false, antisemitic, or both? Congrats, by the way.
In all seriousness, you appear to be doing the following things:
a) Conflating the actions of Israel with the actions of all Jews. That's like conflating the actions of, say, the DRC, or the slave-owning "Christians", with all of Christianity. Yes, Israel has done some bad things. But first of all, there is a substantial Israeli Jewish dissenting movement, and second of all, and more importantly, a government != the people, and actions of a government != the people of the ethnicity the country is primarily composed of. (That != means "is not equal to").
b) Double standards. No reviews on books of Korean myths? What about North Korea? China? What of the Uyghurs? German myths? What of Hitler? Russian? What about Ukraine? And so on. Israel has done many bad things and this does not exonerate it but it's ridiculous to pretend that you're not holding it to a double standard here.
c) THE HOLOCAUST WAS NOT FAKE.
End of discussion.
It is the *best-documented* genocide. We have testimony *of the people who did it*, who never argued its existence. We have testimony of everything, and it aligns perfectly. Further, the few minor errors (soap, anyone?) have been both identified and corrected in scholarly literature, and were at most minor quibbles. They in no way negated the mainstream figures: six million dead Jews, a few million others, depending on how you define "genocide" vs "political persecution" vs whatever (my line: if it was for something you couldn't change. Jehovah's Witnesses could convert, political opponents could stop speaking out, soldiers could not enlist; Jews, gays, Romani, disabled people, etc could not change that status under Nazi rule, but that's just my line). What you're doing is like in that joke about a museum guard who says a dino skeleton is, say, sixty-eight million years old, and thirty, since sixty-eight million is how old they said it was when he started working. Yes, we may have over/under counted by a few hundred deaths, but it doesn't matter; it's still six million, because otherwise we need to commit to the dinosaur being sixty-eight million and thirty years old.
Further, even if you accept that Jews could somehow have forged *the camps themselves*, the question still stands of where the Jews went. As I'm typing this, the world's Jewish population is still smaller than it was in *1939*, a terrifying statistic. Where did all those Jews go?
And if you say those were forged somehow - why in the world would my family, three seperate times - one after Kristallnacht, one after the invasion of Poland, one after Moldova - flee? The first two were factory owners. One, a former factory owner, became a truck driver in America. Why would he have, if not for a threat? Why would Moldovans uproot and move to Azerbaijan, Germans and Poles to Israel--or, at the time, Mandatory Palestine--and so on, if not for a threat?
Also, here's one more thing: This is a waste of your life. There's so much cool stuff out there. Bajillions (very scientific term here) of bacteria. New discoveries. New things. We're alive at a time when more knowledge has been produced than ever in the history of humanity. And there's so much we don't know, like how lightning, ice skating, static charge, sand flow, and so much else. We don't know and we're trying to figure it out and we're doing good at it and you could have done so much else with the time you poured into conspiracy theories. You could have learned some statistics to memorize, or even just to look up occasionally.
Because - for all that you are an examplar of the worst traits of humanity - humanity is *really cool*. We cooperate in ways unthinkable for chimps, and we're *mostly peaceful.* We learn new things, and we laugh and play and wonder and cry and love and live our lives on an infinitesimal speck in a solar system distinguished only by its lack of a second sun (most systems are binaries, with another star) in a typical galaxy, and we've never ventured far beyond it, and we are by all measures unimportant and infinitesimal and getting excited over stupid little things. We're cosmic babies. We think landing on the moon is a big deal, and it's really close to us even at the scale of the solar system!
But.
But, we still have done *so much.* We figured out the age of the Earth, and the universe. We've peered into the inside of the earth, no small feat, and discovered so much about atoms and quarks. We figured out what killed the dinosaurs, and we detected exoplanets. We proved Fermat's Last Theorem and cloned sheep, we discovered genes and began manipulating them, and we *ERADICATED A DISEASE*, smallpox (get your shots).
And all of that just in the twentieth century!
And here you go, denying facts, wasting your life consuming conspiracy theories.
Maybe the aliens have reached us, and they're here happily conversing with the cats. Cats don't do conspiracy theories. They're speciesist, sure, but conspiracy theorists? No.
Reviewer:
junkiehulett
-
favorite -
May 19, 2021
Subject: trash religion
Subject: trash religion
fuck israel and the holocaust hoax.
There are 2 reviews for this item. .
